If Hitler had developed his own bomb, history would be worst than whats on the history books. Nuclear bombs are the super killers in the 21st century and still the super killer of today's century. If the Nazi could kill millions of jews without the use of this super weapon, how much more if they have even one.

The nuclear research effort most widely discussed was that of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, or KWG team, led by the physicist Werner Heisenberg. The second was a Heereswaffenamt ("HWA") military team under the scientific leadership of Prof. Kurt Diebner. Diebner also had some interaction with Heisenberg on nuclear reactor design during the war, but the projects which they led were quite separate.

Immediately before the end of the war, Diebner had a laboratory under a school stadium in Stadtilm, Leipzig. There he was working on development of a uranium atomic bomb. After postwar interrogation, Diebner was considered an unrepentant Nazi and was not allowed to resume a scientific career. He died on 13 July 1964.

All German nuclear research was originally funded through the Reichspost, under the Reich Research Council; however, in 1942, armaments minister Albert Speer reorganised nuclear research and switched all funding to only support development of nuclear reactors.

Dr. Groth and Dr. Paul Harteck were dismayed at the loss of funding for military use of nuclear energy for weapons. Harteck in particular had worked with Dr. Fritz Houtermans on the problem of plutonium chemical separation (from uranium). These men were keenly aware of the Austrian scientist Prof. Josef Schintlmeister, who proposed in 1940 for the construction of a nuclear reactor to breed plutonium for bombs.

Groth and Harteck led a team of physicists and chemists in 1942 to persuade Herman Goering and Martin Bormann to fund an alternate nuclear project to Heisenberg's.

Dr. Paul Harteck, chief physicist of the German army, had helped to develop the gaseous uranium centrifuge invented by Dr. Erich Bagge, in 1942 at Kiel. The gaseous centrifuge was also known as an isotope sluice. It has since come to be known as the Harteck process.

Harteck initially led a team at Hamburg attempting to create a nuclear propelled U-boat. After the bombing of Hamburg in July 1943, the Kriegsmarine shifted its nuclear project to Stettin under admirals Karl Witzell and Otto Rhein. Physicist Dr. Otto Haxel took over scientific leadership of the Oberkommando der Marine (OKM) nuclear project. In April 1944 Harteck was responsible for gaining Nazi funding for industrial scale enrichment of uranium. Orders were placed with BMAG Meguin for production of gaseous uranium centrifuges.

Uranium ore was sourced from western Czechoslovakia at Jachymov, then known as Joachimsthal. It was refined by Auergesellschaft at Oranienburg north of Berlin.

Controversy around Nazi development of nuclear weapons places huge reliance upon Heisenberg's inability to identify the average cross section of neutron release in a chain reaction. At the presentation given by Harteck to Nazi leaders in 1942, however, it was correctly identified that one only needed a uranium warhead "the size of a pineapple."

The intentions of Heisenberg's team are a matter of historical controversy, centering on whether or not the scientists involved were genuinely attempting to build an atomic bomb for Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, or were trying to hinder development of nuclear weapons. Heisenberg's project was not a military success by any measure.

In efforts with Dr. Robert Döpel at Leipzig in May 1942, a fission chain reaction had been sustained by using two concentric shells of uranium oxide separated by heavy water. However, Heisenberg failed to provide any means for controlling the reaction. It quickly resulted in a runaway nuclear reaction which ended with a massive steam explosion.

A heavy water nuclear test reactor was built in a cave in Haigerloch. This reactor never reached critical condition, because the amount of uranium was never sufficient. Its approach was different from the earlier experiment and used cubes of uranium suspended by chains. The cave is now a museum.

Effectiveness and implications

Nuclear fission was discovered in Germany in 1938–1939 through the work of Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassman, Lise Meitner, and Otto Robert Frisch (following up on work done by Enrico Fermi). By the beginning of World War II the scientific community was well aware of the early German lead in this area of nuclear physics.

The threat of a Nazi atomic bomb was one of the primary driving forces behind the creation of the British Tube Alloys project which would eventually lead to the Allied nuclear weapons effort: the Manhattan Project. Several European exiles from Germany, Italy, Hungary and other nations eventually would make significant contributions to the Allied nuclear effort. The German government never did finance a full crash program to develop weapons, as they estimated it could not be completed in time for use in the war, thus the German program was much more limited in capacity and ability when compared to the eventual size and priority of the Manhattan Project.

In 1945, a U.S. investigation called Operation Alsos determined that German scientists under Heisenberg were close, but still short, of the point that Allied scientists had reached in 1942, the creation of a sustained nuclear chain reaction, a crucial step for creating a nuclear reactor (which in turn could be used for either peaceful purposes, or for creating plutonium, needed for nuclear weapons). The U-234 submarine tried to deliver uranium and advanced weapons technology to Japan, but after the German capitulation, it surrendered to the U.S. before reaching Japan.

There has been a historical debate, however, as to whether the German scientists purposefully sabotaged the project by under-representing their chances at success, or whether their estimates were based in either error or inadequacy.

Post war

After the war, ten German scientists—Erich Bagge, Kurt Diebner, Walther Gerlach, Paul Harteck, Horst Korsching, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Karl Wirtz, Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn (who had co-discovered nuclear fission), and Max von Laue (an ardent anti-Nazi)—were taken captive by Allied forces and put under secret watch at Farm Hall, England, as part of Operation Epsilon. Their conversations were recorded as Allied analysts attempted to discover the extent of German knowledge about nuclear weapons. The results were inconclusive, but they allowed them to hear the results of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, which sent Hahn into a near-suicidal despair. By the next morning, Heisenberg claimed to have worked out exactly how the American atomic bomb must have worked, judging from reports of the damage and explosive size, and gave a lecture to the rest of the captive scientists on the effort.

While it is clear that Heisenberg had a firm understanding of the principles involved, he, either consciously or erroneously, greatly overestimated the amount of fissionable material required by several orders of magnitude.

^{courtesy of wikipedia.com}

There have been numerous other cited factors for the failure of the German program. One is that the repressive policies under Hitler encouraged many top scientists to flee Europe, including many who worked on the Allied project (Heisenberg himself was a target of party propaganda for some time during the Deutsche Physik movement). Another, put forth by Alsos scientific head Samuel Goudsmit, was that the stifling, utilitarian political atmosphere adversely affected the quality of the science done. Another is that the German homeland was nowhere near as secure from air attack as was the U.S.A. Had the many massive centralized factories and production facilities constructed for the U.S. bomb project been built in Germany, they would have been prime targets for Allied bombing raids.

In fact, laboratories were founded for uranium enrichment in at least three locations, which were hounded by Allied bombing. The British spy Paul Rosebaud worked for a metal industry magazine, and thus had unparalleled access to nuclear projects up until April 1944. Rosebaud fed information to the Allies through Operation Epsilon in Stockholm. This, rather than lack of technical expertise foiled Nazi nuclear efforts.^{[citation needed]}

The Germans’ only source of heavy water, a necessary component of some of their bomb research, was Norsk Hydro's plant in Vemork, Norway. In February 1943, a Norwegian Commando unit sabotaged the plant. The plant was later bombed from the air and a shipment of heavy water was destroyed in transit. Whether this affected the German program is not clear.

Following the 20 July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler, control of nuclear projects came under control of the SS and in particular of SS Lt General Dr. Ing Hans Kammler. Kammler himself disappeared at the end of the war. Kammler's boss, Heinrich Himmler, who was trying to negotiate an end to the war through Count Folke Bernadotte in Sweden, took a sudden interest in the nuclear project in August 1944.

According to Farm Hall transcripts of a conversation by General Walter Dornberger with another general, Dornberger said that in October 1944, he and V-2 rocket engineer Wernher von Braun went to Lisbon to negotiate a capitulation of Nazi scientists to the U.S. forces. They negotiated with two representatives of General Electric corporation. At this time in the war such a trip could only have been made if it was sanctioned by both Kammler and Himmler.

In 2005, Berlin historian Rainer Karlsch published a book, Hitlers Bombe (in German), which was reported in the press as claiming to provide evidence that Nazi Germany had tested crude nuclear weapons on Rügen island (October 12, 1944) and near Ohrdruf, Thuringia (March 4, 1945), the latter killing 500 prisoners of war under the supervision of the SS. Allegedly, this second test was documented in a film classified after the war in Soviet possession, with the relevant available KGB files also noting highly increased levels of radioactivity in the area of the latter blast. Some press reports, however, have reported the book as only having claimed to provide evidence that the Nazis had been successful with a radiological weapon (a dirty bomb), not a "true" nuclear weapon powered by nuclear fission; while Karlsch asserts that it could have been a thermonuclear hybrid bomb based on the nuclear fusion experiments using shaped charges performed by the Heereswaffenamt under the supervision of Professor Kurt Diebner since 1943. If this is true, it means that the Germans successfully developed nuclear fusion without first developing nuclear fission, and according to Karlsch it is indeed true that German physicist Ulrich Jetter in a German scientific journal article described a fusion-based hydrogen bomb in highly advanced detail as early as 1950, when the U.S. and Soviet research on such was still highly classified and one year before the first initial experimental tests as part of Operation Greenhouse. From 1952 on, Erich Schumann, Hans Winkhaus, and Walter Trinks, three war-time members of the Heereswaffenamt, tried to get patents for the shaped charge thermonuclear fusion bomb that the Heereswaffenamt had been researching on during the war, but were not granted any patents due to Allied occupation statutes. Karlsch interprets said article by Jetter and the patent attempts by the Schumann-Winkhaus-Trinks team as that the war-time fusion experiments by the Heereswaffenamt had not been as secret among German scientists during the war as previously thought. Karlsch's primary evidence, according to his publisher's reports, are "vouchers" for the "tests" and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker's six patents for a plutonium weapon, explicitly referred to as a "bomb" by von Weizsäcker, from 1941. Von Weizsäcker's patents were immediately classified in 1941 and did not surface to the public until after the war. Karlsch cites a witness of the Ohrdruf blast and another witness of the scorched bodies of victims afterwards. He also claims to have radioactive samples of soil from the test sites. At the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 Nazi munitions minister Albert Speer was questioned by prosecutors about the Ohrdruf blast, in an attempt to hold Speer accountable for its victims.

Mainstream American historians have expressed skepticism towards any claims that Nazi Germany was in any way close to success at producing a true nuclear weapon, citing the copious amounts of evidence which seem to indicate the contrary. Others counter that Prof. Kurt Diebner had a project which was far more advanced than that most-discussed of Dr. Werner Heisenberg. A 2002 article in the scientific German journal Physik unserer Zeit by the respected American historian Mark Walker has presented some of Karlsch's less controversial claims—that the Germans had done research on fusion, that they were aware that a bomb could potentially be made with plutonium, that they had engaged in some sort of test of some sort of device, that a patent on a plutonium device (of unspecified detail) had been filed and found—as substantiated, three years before Karlsch's book.

Heavy Water to develop Nuclear Bomb

When Nazi Germany investigated the possibility of building an atomic bomb, a range of potential paths forward became clear. Details of how the decision to go down the heavy water route was made are likely to remain somewhat obscure but, although unsuccessful, it was based on what was later demonstrated to be a technically viable approach:

• Plutonium-239 (²³⁹Pu) makes an effective weapons material.
• Heavy water has been demonstrated as an effective moderator for ²³⁹Pu production.
• Heavy water may be separated from regular water by electrolysis.

Approaches to developing a weapon

In nuclear weapon development, the main problem is securing sufficient "weapons grade" material, in particular the fissile isotopes of either uranium-235 (²³⁵U) or ²³⁹Pu. In order to produce weapons grade uranium, one may elect to extract uranium from natural ore and enrich it. Alternately one can "breed" plutonium in a nuclear reactor using unenriched uranium as a fuel and then chemically separate the ²³⁹Pu produced. Unlike the Allies, who chose to pursue both the enrichment of uranium and production of plutonium in reactors, German scientists elected to focus on plutonium production, as the industrial complex required to make weapons this way was less expensive.

Plutonium production

Although the most common isotope of uranium, uranium-238 (²³⁸U), is useless as fissile material for an atomic bomb, ²³⁸U can be used to produce ²³⁹Pu. The fission of ²³⁵U produces neutrons, some of which will be absorbed by ²³⁸U creating ²³⁹U. After a few days the ²³⁹U will decay, turning into weapons-usable ²³⁹Pu. The Germans did not examine ultrapure graphite because they did not know that the graphite they had tried was too impure to sustain a chain reaction, and abandoned it as a possible moderator. They instead settled on the heavy-water-based reactor design. A heavy water moderated nuclear reactor could be used to do nuclear fission research, and, ultimately, to breed plutonium from which a bomb could be constructed.

Heavy water production

Heavy-water is a byproduct of ammonia fertilizer production. Hydrogen was, at the time, mainly produced by electrolysis of water.^[2] The Haber Process is then used, reacting the hydrogen with nitrogen from air to produce ammonia. At the time, Europe's major supply of ammonia came from the Norwegian Vemork hydroelectric plant, run by Norsk Hydro, near Rjukan in the Telemark region.

The technology is very simple and straightforward. Heavy water (D₂O) is separated from regular water by electrolysis because the difference in mass between the two hydrogen isotopes translates into a slight difference in the speed at which the reaction proceeds. To produce pure heavy water by electrolysis requires a large cascade of electrolysis chambers, and consumes large amounts of power. Since the production of hydrogen relied on electrolysis at Vemork, heavy water was a routine byproduct.

Hans Suess was a German advisor to the production of heavy water. Suess had assessed the Rjukan plant as being incapable of producing militarily useful quantities of heavy water in less than five years at its then current capacity.

Note: Heavy Water Production in Norwegian was successful but it did not reach to its main purpose for the nazi regime. That is because of the efforts made by Norwegian and British soldiers they had successfully stop Hitlers ambition of owning a super bomb.